An aircraft en-route to its destination may face numerous airborne constraints that can impact the on-time performance, fuel consumption, passenger comfort, emissions, and other factors that contribute to the cost, customer experience and safety of a flight. Such airborne constraints may include headwinds, tailwinds, turbulence, volcanic ash, convective weather, air traffic congestion, icing potential, high ice water content causing engine power loss, environmental impact constraints such as contrail formation, and the like. The flight crew of the aircraft or route planning personnel at the airline's operation center (“AOC”) or an Air Navigation Service Provider (“ANSP”) may analyze the affects of these airborne constraints on multiple flight routes in order to select an optimized flight route for the aircraft, thereby decreasing fuel usage, flight time, and emissions, while increasing passenger safety and comfort.
Current plan-view situation displays on aircraft, such as a plan-mode navigation display showing multiple flight routes, are only capable of showing the impact of the airborne constraints at one altitude stratum, and comparisons between flight plan routes and constraints at differing flight levels may be a high workload and cognitively demanding task. This may be especially problematic during high workload phases of flight. Further, while vertical situation displays may be available for viewing the vertical component of a flight route, these displays are generally limited to viewing the profile of the active flight plan route only, and may not show the vertical components of the airborne constraints along the route. These single vertical situation display implementations therefore present incomplete information to the flight crew or route planning personnel.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the disclosure made herein is presented.